- Watchdog finds Hegseth risked endangering troops by sharing sensitive war plans on Signal, sources say
Source: CNN
“Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth risked compromising sensitive military information, which could have endangered American troops and mission objectives, when he used Signal in March of this year to share highly-sensitive attack plans targeting Houthi rebels in Yemen, according to four sources familiar with the contents of a classified Inspector General report. The repercussions of Hegseth’s action, two sources told CNN, are less clear since the IG concluded that the defense secretary has the authority to declassify information and Hegseth asserted he made an operational decision in the moment to share that information, though there is no documentation of such a decision. An unclassified version of the report is set to be publicly released Thursday. The classified report was sent to Congress on Tuesday night.” (12/03/25)
https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/03/politics/report-hegseth-signal
- Trump pardons Azerbaijan’s alleged congressional mole
Source: The Guardian [UK]
“Donald Trump pardoned Texas Democratic representative Henry Cuellar and his wife in a federal bribery and conspiracy case on Wednesday, citing what he called a ‘weaponized’ justice system. Trump, who has argued that his own legal troubles were a partisan witch-hunt, said on social media that the congressman and his wife, Imelda Cuellar, were prosecuted because the representative had been critical of Joe Biden’s immigration policies. … Federal authorities had charged Cuellar, 69, and his wife with accepting thousands of dollars in exchange for the congressman advancing the interests of an Azerbaijan-controlled energy company and a bank in Mexico. Cuellar is accused of agreeing to influence legislation favorable to Azerbaijan and deliver a pro-Azerbaijan speech on the floor of the US House.” (12/03/25)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/trump-pardons-democrat-henry-cuellar
- Cuba: Massive power outage hits western region after transmission line fails
Source: SFGate
“A blackout hit Havana and the rest of the western half of Cuba on Wednesday, leaving millions of people without power on an island struggling with chronic outages blamed on a crumbling electric grid. Lázaro Guerra, general director of the Ministry of Energy and Mines, said the massive outage was caused by a failure on a transmission line that connects two major plants. He said power would be restored gradually. In Havana, dozens of police officers were trying to direct traffic while many students who were already in school were sent back home. Small businesses that have generators resumed their sales, especially of food. Some areas had intermittent internet service, so many residents were left wondering what had happened. ‘There’s no connection. No one knows why the power is out. … They’re not saying anything; it’s all silence,’ grumbled Raúl Calderón, an 82-year-old retiree, as he waited to hear official reports on the radio.” (12/03/25)
- House Republicans subpoena Jack Smith for closed-door interview about his prosecutions of Trump
Source: SFGate
“The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith for a closed-door interview later this month even though he had earlier volunteered to appear for an open hearing about his prosecutions of President Donald Trump. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the committee’s Republican chairman, directed Smith in a letter dated Wednesday to appear for a private deposition on Dec. 17 as part of the panel’s investigations into the prosecutor’s work. ‘Due to your service as Special Counsel, the Committee believes that you possess information that is vital to its oversight of this matter,’ Jordan wrote. He also asked Smith to produce records to the committee in addition to his testimony. A lawyer for Smith, Peter Koski, said in a statement that Smith had offered nearly six weeks ago to appear before the committee in an open hearing but would nonetheless appear as requested for the deposition.” (12/03/25)
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/house-republicans-subpoena-jack-smith-for-21221263.php
- Amazon tests 30-minute delivery with pilot
Source: Seattle Times
“If two-day or even same-day delivery is too slow for you, a new feature from Amazon might have you covered. The Seattle-based e-commerce giant on Monday launched Amazon Now, a delivery offering with a promise to deliver groceries and other household items in 30 minutes or less. … Amazon is testing the program in certain areas of Seattle and Philadelphia, the company said. … The move puts Amazon into direct competition with companies like Instacart and Uber, the latter of which delivers food and groceries through its Uber Eats service. It also builds on Amazon’s push to become a widely recognized grocery retailer with a robust delivery service.” (12/03/25)
- Obama Paved the Way for Trump’s Venezuelan Killings
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Jim Bovard“The Trump administration’s killings of scores of Venezuelans are justifiably provoking outrage. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently proclaimed, ‘We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.’ Donald Trump and Hegseth are cashing a blank check for carnage that was written years earlier by President Barack Obama. … Many Americans who voted for Obama in 2008 expected a seachange in Washington. However, from his first weeks in office, Obama authorized widespread secret attacks against foreign suspects, some of which spurred headlines when drones slaughtered wedding parties or other innocents. On February 3, 2010, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair stunned Washington by announcing that the administration was also targeting Americans for killing.” (12/03/25)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/obama-paved-the-way-for-trumps-venezuelan-killings
- Government wants to keep you poor
Source: Eastern New Mexico News
by Kent McManigal“Legitimacy doesn’t come from official recognition. Government attention is poison to innovation. Look at Bitcoin: the moment government began paying attention, regulators attacked it with taxes, rules, and other interference. This destroyed much of the freedom and utility of cryptocurrency. Keep your filthy government off my life! Government doesn’t need a process to smother every human activity. Life doesn’t need to be micromanaged by politicians. Liberty — freedom tempered with responsibility — is enough. The market regulates itself when freed from government meddling. Dishonest companies go broke without government protecting them from competition or from cheated customers. Anyone seeking government protection from competition or consequences is in the wrong. Monopolies can only persist with government help. Irresponsible individuals never learn to be better when protected from consequences, or from their victims, by government rules.” (12/03/25)
- Our Ism-less Quarter Century
Source: Law & Liberty
by Daniel M Rothschild“The history of the twentieth century is, in large part, the story of competing totalitarian ideas put into practice, and the destruction, immiseration, and death they produced. … A quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, the difference between then and now could not be more stark. While ours is a moment racked by popular discontent, the diminution and desecration of formal and informal institutions (often at the hands of these institutions’ ostensible leaders), and a significant increase in the breadth of ideas in circulation, there has been very little in the way of legitimately new ideas this century, either at the level of ideology or public policy. Indeed, most of the bad ideas in circulation today are old bad ideas, not new bad ideas.” (12/03/25)
- What Uber and AirBnB Really Sell: Sharing with Transaction Costs Slashed
Source: The Daily Economy
by Michael Munger“Platforms make on-demand access a real alternative to ownership, by reducing the three core transaction costs of sharing with strangers.” (12/03/25)
- Pardons — With Advice and Consent
Source: The Dispatch
by Kevin D Williamson“Trump’s cynical abuse of the pardon power to reward allies or simply to enrich himself and his family is obviously corrupt, which is hardly news. But as Lord Acton knew, absolute power does not corrupt only those who wield it: It ‘corrupts absolutely’ those who are adjacent to it, who are servants of that power. It is difficult to imagine that figures such as Pete Hegseth would be doing what they are doing … without the promise of a pardon should it come to that. … Congress lately cannot manage to perform even its most basic functions, and so this is not exactly a ripe time for a constitutional amendment. But we should begin the work of converting the president’s unilateral pardon power into something less corrupting, for example by requiring that pardons be ratified by a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate — even a simple majority would be an improvement.” (12/03/25)
https://thedispatch.com/article/trump-pardon-cocaine-honduras-hegseth-congress/
- World’s Most Tyrannical Government Wants To Free Venezuela From Tyranny
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone“President Trump has been holding talks with top advisors this week regarding potential US attacks on Venezuela in order to bring about regime change in yet another oil-rich nation. As the western political/media class frames Venezuela’s President Maduro as a ‘dictator’ who must urgently be removed from power, it is worth noting that any US military operation to remove him would be taking place directly against the will of the American public. A recent CBS News poll found that seventy percent of Americans ‘would oppose’ the US taking military action against Venezuela. So here we have the president of a nation which calls itself a democracy, holding meetings to plan military operations which are completely and unambiguously against the wishes of the electorate, in the name of removing a dictator and spreading freedom and democracy. Interesting.” (12/03/25)
- A Thought Experiment for Pro-War Liberals
Source: The Realist Review
by James W Carden“Who are the Good and Bad guys again?” (12/03/25)
https://therealistreview.substack.com/p/a-thought-experiment-for-pro-war
- Trumpian Nonsense on Employing Native-Born Workers
Source: CounterPunch
by Dean Baker“There are so many absurdities coming out of the Trump administration on the economy that it’s hard to keep up. But one recurring theme with a solid basis in a misunderstanding of statistics is the claim that employment of native-born workers is exploding under Trump, after plummeting under Biden. We even got an official tweet of this ignorance from the Labor Department over Thanksgiving weekend. The problem, as I and others have explained, is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has no direct count of native-born workers.” (12/03/25)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/03/trumpian-nonsense-on-employing-native-born-workers/
- 200+ Luminaries Back Demand for Israel to Free Marwan Barghouti
Source: Informed Comment
by Juan Cole“Two hundred prominent literary, cultural and political figures have signed an open letter demanding the release from Israeli prison of Palestinian activist Marwan Barghouti. Barghouti 66, is widely thought to be one of the few figures who could unite the Palestinians and lead them to statehood. Israel has imprisoned him for 23 years after a trial most observers consider extremely flawed to say the least. Israel is apparently preparing to go on an execution spree against Palestinian prisoners, some of whom are held without charges or trial for indefinite periods of time. The star-studded list of signatories includes Margaret Atwood of ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ fame; Mark Ruffalo (a.k.a. the Incredible Hulk); Philip Pullman (author of ‘His Dark Materials’); Paul Simon, who knows a thing or two about bridges over troubled waters; Benedict Cumberbatch (a.k.a. Dr. Strange); Sting, who knows when someone’s watching you …” (12/03/25)
https://www.juancole.com/2025/12/luminaries-business-palestinian.html
- Castro Didn’t Participate in the JFK Autopsy
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger“Last week, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote about ‘a startling document’ that the CIA has kept hidden for some 50 years. The document apparently said that ‘the Mexican government had investigated Kennedy’s assassination and concluded Cuba was responsible.’ It’s just more misdirection on the part of the CIA. Its targeted audience is those Americans who cannot bring themselves to recognize that the Pentagon and the CIA orchestrated and carried out the assassination of a U.S. president. The misdirection serves to confuse and confound that segment of American society.” (12/03/25)
https://www.fff.org/2025/12/03/castro-didnt-participate-in-the-jfk-autopsy/
- How Many Terrorists Came From Afghanistan to America?
Source: Town Hall
by Terry Jeffrey“Former President Joe Biden’s record as commander in chief will forever be defined by Aug. 26, 2021. That was the catastrophic day in the American withdrawal from Afghanistan that Biden declared should be completed by Sept. 11, 2021 — the 20th anniversary of the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks that had triggered the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. ‘U.S. troops as well as forces deployed by our NATO Allies and operational partners, will be out of Afghanistan before we mark the 20th anniversary of that heinous attack on September 11th,’ Biden said on April 14, 2021. As American forces prepared to meet Biden’s deadline, the Taliban — that Afghan regime that had provided sanctuary to al-Qaeda before the 9/11 terrorist attacks — returned to power.” [editor’s note: The withdrawal that Trump negotiated but didn’t follow through on? That withdrawal there? – TLK] (12/03/25)
- Now Trump Is Threatening Naturalized Americans
Source: The Bulwark
by Will Saletan“Donald Trump’s war on immigrants has crossed another line. First, he targeted illegal immigrants. Then he went after legal immigrants. Now, he’s attacking naturalized Americans: citizens of this country who were born elsewhere, particularly in what Trump contemptuously calls the ‘third world.’ He’s trying to turn white Americans against nonwhite Americans.” (12/03/25)
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-threatening-naturalized-american-citizens
- There They Go Again, Venezuela Edition
Source: Common Dreams
by Kevin Martin“Mark Twain allegedly quipped, ‘God created war so Americans would learn geography.’ Whether or not he actually said that, might it not be a good test, that the world’s most mighty military power be prevented from waging war if a majority of Americans failed to find the alleged enemy on a world map? Frivolity aside, this should not need to be said, but the United States has no legal authority to attack Venezuela (nor Iran, Sudan, Somalia, or any other country), nor engage in covert action to overthrow its government. Should the US do so, it will be opposed by everyone south of the Rio Grande …. Whatever one thinks of the current government, nearly 30 million people live in Venezuela, and they don’t deserve to be demonized or threatened for the policies of their president, as Venezuela poses no threat to the United States.” (12/03/25)
- Khanna & Massie tag team against war. And they’re friends, too.
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Jack Hunter“Republican President Donald Trump ran on an ‘America First’ platform yet now seems on the verge of a U.S.-led regime change war in Venezuela. Republican Congressman Thomas Massie (Ky.) has questions about this. During the government shutdown last month, Massie asked a practical, very America first question, ‘How is it that we have money for regime change in Venezuela but not money to pay air traffic controllers in our country?’ It was a good point. Trump, who once vowed to ‘expel the warmongers’ in Washington, prefers to attack Massie on a regular basis. The Kentucky lawmaker is not alone. Massie appeared in June on CBS News’ Face the Nation with his friend and frequent ally, Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna (Calif.).” (12/03/25)
- The Monroe Doctrine, Redux
Source: Independent Institute
by Alex Tokarev“For over two centuries, the Western Hemisphere has been a cul-de-sac where the United States has parked its foreign policy. The principle behind this is known as the Monroe Doctrine, named after James Monroe (1758-1831). (A refresher for those who slept through their high school American history classes: He’s the fifth U.S. president and the only one whose surname sounds like a type of cheese you’d politely refuse.) In recent months, the Monroe Doctrine has made a comeback — like the whale tail on the plumber who came to fix my kitchen sink. And the man at the center of this shift is none other than Donald J. Trump. … Trump isn’t just an American President. He’s also the hemisphere’s new father figure. NATO officials are already calling him ‘daddy,’ a term most people agree should never be used outside of very specific circumstances.” (12/03/25)
https://www.independent.org/article/2025/12/03/monroe-doctrine-redux/
- The case against “good character” provisions
Source: Washington Post
by Stephen Slivinski“Earlier this year, the Palisade and Eaton wildfires near Los Angeles were fought by an army of over 4,000 California state firefighters, alongside thousands of other support personnel. Within that number were more than 780 inmates from state prisons enrolled in the state’s ‘fire camp’ program, which has been operational since World War II. This program provides essential assistance to frontline wildfire containment efforts, as well as providing valuable training to inmates looking for skills — including first aid — they can use to help find work after finishing their sentences. But those released from California prisons would, for many years, run into one of several brick walls. Some couldn’t be hired as a firefighter at municipal-level firehouses because of their prison records. Others might have qualified for firefighter certification but couldn’t obtain an EMT license, a requirement for many firefighter jobs.” (12/03/25)
- The Political Orphanage, 12/03/25
Source: The Political Orphanage
“Freddie deBoer: What It’s Like to Have a Mental Breakdown.” (12/03/25)
https://politicalorphanage.libsyn.com/freddie-deboer-what-its-like-to-have-a-mental-breakdown
- Collateral Damage, episode 8
Source: The Intercept
“Donald Scott was killed in his home by an ad hoc team of raiding cops who were looking for marijuana — but the larger prize may have been his 200-acre Malibu ranch.” (12/03/25)
https://theintercept.com/2025/12/03/collateral-damage-episode-eight-legalized-takings/
- Reason Interview: Matt Ridley
Source: Reason
“Why Science Lost Its Way.” (12/03/25)
https://reason.com/podcast/2025/12/03/why-science-lost-its-way/
- Underthrow Podcast, 12/03/25
Source: Underthrow
“Building Hong Kong in Honduras with Niklas Anzinger.” (12/03/25)
- The Daily Blast With Greg Sargent, 12/03/25
Source: The New Republic
“Trump Tirades at Media Darken as MAGA Bloodlust on Bombings Boils Over.” (12/03/25)
https://newrepublic.com/article/203887/trump-seethes-darkly-media-maga-bloodlust-bombings-boils